With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal,and rescue illuminates this book like flashes of heat lightening.

Love makes you understand not intimacy but the difficulty of which. The difficulty of expressing it, of temporarily giving yourself over to someone else, of trusting and of being relied on.

And recording the traces of intimacy is a difficult task for writers.Intimate scene is one of the core tricks of make-believe in romantic narratives. This passage from The English Patient shows us how perfectly itimacy can be described in English, in the wildest and most subdued way:

'What is terrible in what I did? Don’t we forgive everything of a lover? We forgive selfishness, desire, guile. As long as we are the motive for it. You can make love to a woman with a broken arm, or a woman with fever. She once sucked blood from a cut on my hand as I had tasted and swallowed her menstrual blood. There are some European words you can never translate properly into another language. Felhomaly. The dusk of graves. With the connotation of intimacy there between the dead and the living.
I lifted her into my arms from the shelf of sleep. Clothing like cobweb. I disturbed all that.'

We can find several locales for the intimate moments to happen: the tent & library for Hana and Kip, hotel room for the English and kate, English patien's ward for H&K&Caravaggio.

Near the end of the novel, Kip, now a family man, starts to look back on his days when he was in love with Hana: 'Now there are these urges to talk with her during a meal and return to that stage they were most intimate at in the tent or in the English patient’s room, both of which contained the turbulent river of space between them. Recalling the time, he is just as fascinated at himself there as he is with her—boyish and earnest, his lithe arm moving across the air towards the girl he has fallen in love with. '